How Co-Marketing Can Expand Your Reach

How do you meet your marketing goals with a small staff and a tight budget?

It’s a crucial question almost every marketing team on the planet is struggling with right now. Easy answers are tough to find.

We can tell you, though, what is working for us, so that you can grab an actionable insight or two.

Our strategy boils down to one odd, little word: co-marketing. It’s all about leveraging the resources and relationships you have, rather than worrying about all of the shiny new things you don’t have the time or money to do.

Co-Marketing, Briefly Defined

Co-marketing is the process of aligning your company’s interests, resources and marketing muscle with other like-minded companies to accomplish much more than you might on your own.

The concept has been around a long time in advertising. Any airline magazine has ads with the Top Steakhouses, Top Seafood Restaurants or even Top Plastic Surgeons.

Basically, these similar and complementary companies band together and unite their advertising budgets to cut the cost of an ad by 10 times or more (depending on the number of participants).

It’s brilliant.

And it isn’t all about just saving money. It’s also about brand and credibility.

Putting all of these top names together dramatically increases brand recognition, customer value and customer retention. Every time business travelers fly to a location where one of these top providers is located, they have a ready-made reference to help them find a good meal … and, if need be, a top-notch surgeon.

How Does This Apply to Internet Marketing?

At InsideSales.com, we do a lot of webinars. Webinars are one of the most cost-effective ways for B2B companies to generate leads and sales.

This is an example of co-marketing on a small scale. And it works really well. Another webinar we did with two other companies generated 3,830 leads. Without those partners, we probably would have only earned a third of the leads for the same amount of work.

How It’s Done: 4 Quick Tips

Now that you’re sold on the value of co-marketing, it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty of how it’s done.

Here are four quick tips we’ve learned from trial and error:

Make it a win-win: Identify partners that align well with your business. Show them the value of joining forces with you by sharing data about what results they can expect based on past successes.

Give more than you get: Selling your value to somebody else is the easy part. Strive to exceed your partners’ expectations by throwing all of your marketing might behind your joint efforts. Don’t hold back and expect your partner to do the heavy lifting.

Make it easy: Asking somebody to join you in a marketing campaign is kind of like inviting them over to a backyard barbecue. The less you ask them to do or bring, the more likely they are to show up smiling. Create a simple checklist and a promotion kit, complete with sample emails, tweets and other collateral, and share these items with your partners.

Do a debriefing: After every webinar we do, we link up with our partner for a quick debriefing call to review what went well and what we can improve on next time. This step is easy to overlook in the hustle and bustle of a busy day. But it’s an absolutely critical step.

If you use these four tips, you’ll run successful co-marketing campaigns. And you’ll also build lifelong relationships with valuable business partners.

It works so well, in fact, that we recently decided to do it on a bigger stage.

Marketing on Steroids

On June 20, we are bringing together the top minds in sales and marketing for an all-day virtual summit. Everybody who participates will earn exposure and get the chance to showcase their thought leadership and expertise. The more we all help one another promote the event, the more we’ll all win. Through collaborative marketing, we’re creating an audience that the individual organizations could never amass on their own.

It’s called the Inside Sales Virtual Summit. The all-star lineup features 62 leading experts, including 11 best-selling authors, including the following:

Guy Kawasaki – Author, Social Media Thought Leader

Jon Miller, VP of Marketing, Marketo

Jeffrey Gitomer – Author of the Little Red Book of Selling

Josh James – Founder of Domo and Omniture

Yusuf Tayob – Partner, Accenture

Brian Frank – Global Head of Sales, LinkedIn

Jason Garoutte, CMO and GM, Mintigo

It’s a virtual trade show, so it will be a much more dynamic experience than a regular webinar. It also requires a lot more coordination. But we’re sure it will be worth it for everybody involved.

The Inside Sales Virtual Summit will take place June 20 and attendance is free. Join more than 10,000 of your peers.

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